Celestial Mechanica: At Least it Looks Nice...

Developer: Roger Hicks and Paul Veer

Publisher: Roger Hicks and Paul Veer

System: PC

Celestial Mechanica is a 2D adventure puzzle-platformer game with an interesting premise. You're a robot banished from your homeland, and are trying to get back. It's a lot more complicated than that, but I would like for you to experience this yourself. You soon team up with another robot in the same boat, and soon the two of you begin your journey to get back to Mechanica.

You gain an array of upgrades, be it simple things like double or wall jumping, or maybe a more complex one that allows you to catch enemy projects and throw them back. The enemies are standard, being people with standard guns and people with homing rockets. The obstacles are pretty standard, like spikes and walls of electricity. These keep things fresh for the majority of the puzzles and platforming.

Now before I start going into the bad parts of the game at hand, let me talk about the good points: Narrative, Visuals, and Music. The music is atmospheric and beautiful, but not always the most fitting of tunes. The visuals are a clean, pixelated art style, and just overall looks downright beautiful. The sprites and animations are just as gorgeous as the backgrounds. This all adds up to a decently composed atmosphere, which is done pretty well.

Now for a new bad parts of the game.

The gameplay or platforming is like the controls from League of Evil on about 7 lines of cocaine. You are WAY too fast in this game. It's too hard to control, especially when you obtain the double jump. You jump up walls and it's just like you did a line of cocaine! You're not supposed to be able to jump up walls like that, it's not natural! I died a little way too many times on the second jump, which is pretty bad game design. It seems like it'd be really fun if you could slow down the game a few notches. I'm not sure if it's just for me, but I don't know how to fix it, so I'm gonna assume it's supposed to be this way.

The second major thing is the poor conveyance. It's hard to understand where to go durring most of the puzzles. Nothing really tells you that you're supposed to backtrack a few rooms to do something that you can now do due to an upgrade. There's a lot of instances like that, which is bad. You spend a lot of time backtracking and it's never conveyed that thats what you're supposed to do! It's infuriating.

Over all, with decent level design in the platforming only areas, Celestial Mechanica is a pain in the ass to play. It's infuriating to play through the dungeons, no matter how beautiful the art or music, or even how intriguing the story and premise are. It's a shame that the death animation isn't very much of an animation, because you'll be seeing it a LOT due to these hyped-up-on-cocaine controls. Just turn down the speed, and make the puzzles a bit more clear, not blatantly obvious, but just clear, and this would be a great game.

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